Choose a Domain Name For Your Business

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Domain name is required no matters what size your business is, what products or services your company provides. It’s just a matter of time for your company to have your very own webpage. To understand more why should you have your own webpage, please check my another article at “Should I Have My Own Web Page?” .

Domain name plays more than just Uniform Resource Locator(URL), it’s how people identity you on internet, yet domain name also reflects your company brand that matters a lot in digital advertising.

Choosing a perfect domain could be crucial, after brainstorming for hours, only to find that it’s already taken, don’t worry, everyone has been there. Good news is, here’s some tips you can use to find a great domain name.

1. Easy To Remember

Your domain must be recognizable and easy to remember. You don’t want to ended up with a terrific website, but no one can ever remember the domain name because it’s so hard to remember or pronounce.

Domain name can hold up to 67 characters, one tips to make it easy to remember, “Shorter Does Matter”. It’s almost impossible for you to get a domain with one memorable word, try adding one or two more words to make it more unique and easy to remember, like Facebook.com or Youtube.com.

If someone already owned your desired domain, don’t be sad though, if you are lucky, some of the domains are up for sales and waiting for the new owners and it could be you, with extra dollars of course. You can check either your intended domain are up for auction at Godaddy Auction.

2. “.com” always comes first

Stick with the original Top-Level Domains(TLD), widely used are .com(Commercial), .net(network), .org(Non-profit Organizations), you can check the rest at Wikipedia. Based on the report on 10 April 2016, up to 49.5% of all websites are “.com”. It’s preferred extension and the easiest to remember.

2. Easy to Say In Person

Both hyphens and numbers make it harder for your domain to verbally. Some time people might have a difficult time finding the hyphens(-) character on the keyboard, believe me, it’s also pain in the neck to type. Although numbers and hyphens are allowed in URL, try to avoid them.

3. Do The Radio Test

Radio test finds possible misshearings or misspellings of your domain. If you are going to place an ad on the radio or said it to someone through phone, make sure it’s easy for them to pronounce and remember. try don’t to use homonym words, it creates the unnecessary confusion for your visitor, like ‘hear’ and ‘here’. Surprisingly 68.4% of domains fail the radio test.

6. Easy To Read In Print & Online Ads

You can use capital letters or use a different font or color to make them easier to read, for example at this very page, I use different color for “Market” and “Effort”.

You might have a lot of ideas going on right now, here is my last advice to you: Don’t rush it.

Choosing the right domain name is very important to your business, sit down, list down all the possible keywords that you would like to include in the URL, take times to analysis and filter the result carefully.

It may be a lot of works, but it contains a lot of fun as well! Market Effort would like to wish you good luck on domain hunting.